If you’re marketing your practice to a local audience, you need a local approach. This means focusing on gaining reviews and citations as well as taking advantage solutions like AdWords that take a local-approach to advertising. To expand your reach, put these best practices to use:
Focus on Reviews
Your practice sees numerous clients or patients each day, and hopefully, each one leaves having a positive experience. When clients and patients are happy with their experience, they’ll sing your praises to friends and family. But encouraging them to review your practice online can help boost the effectiveness of word of mouth advertising.
The only problem is that you shouldn’t be asking them to leave reviews directly. And you definitely shouldn’t be rewarding people for leaving reviews. Genuine, unbiased reviews are what will have the most positive effect. So, how can you get more reviews? Here are some tips:
- Make it easy for clients and patients to leave reviews by linking to your review profiles on your website.
- On completion of service, hand your clients print materials that include listing places where they can leave reviews. Need help creating a printout? Whitespark offers a handy review handout generator.
- In follow-up emails, include a link to where customers can leave a review. Note: Don’t include a link to Yelp.
- Focus on offering top-notch customer service. When customers have an exceptional experience, they will be more inclined to seek out review sites and share their experience without any additional encouragement.
Get Citations
Citations are just as they sound: mentions of your business’s name and address on other websites. Citations don’t have to include links. They can be a simple text listing of your practice’s location information.
Citations are an important part of both Google’s and Bing’s ranking algorithms, so it’s important to make sure that your business obtains them from high quality sources.
Here are a few places to obtain citations from:
- Local search engines
- Data aggregators, like Factual, Infogroup and Acxiom
- Local online directories
- Local blogs
- Industry-related blogs and directories
Take Advantage of AdWords
Google AdWords is a smart and affordable way to reach your local audience. With an active AdWords campaign, your advertisement will appear in the search results whenever someone searches for your services.
Unlike other advertising platforms, AdWords offers a number of ad formats. These include call extensions, which allow mobile users to “click to call”. Promotions and location extensions can also be included. With the ability to track the cost per click, number of ad impressions, click-through-rates and more, you can get the most out of your online advertising budget.
